My story yesterday prompted another:
There must be some deeply embedded part of the human psyche that prompts us, at a certain point of our lives to make the decision that we need to embark upon the process of bringing our own children into the world.
For many this might just be the consistent failure of the rhythm method ? the contraceptive method in which the participants are commonly known as parents.
We had waited, and waited. Consistently telling ourselves that our lives and our love would somehow be unbalanced y the introduction of a child. A totally and wholly dependent mouth, nose and eyes that would take all of our love, stamina and attention and progressively drain it.
By August of 1989 we reached a point of readiness. Nothing specific, nothing conscious. No deliberate conversation. No biological clock had suddenly chimed out a warning.
So on a hot Sunday afternoon we drove out of town to a shabby little smallholding and procured for ourselves, two dogs.
Actually we had no intention of procuring two. But like all puppies they were sweet and tiny. The one forlorn, the other an irresistible ragamuffin.
They were of indeterminate species. Brothers from the same litter it transpired.
And in both those two sentences lies a long-term litany of indescribable trauma and angst.
They were duly names Bilbo and Baggins.
And the proceeded to eat us out of house and home.
It transpired that they were somehow a cross between Labrador and hyena. With some seriously mutated genes.
They had a capacity to eat a 50kg bag of dog food and using some sort of multiplier effect deposit 100s of kilos of dog poo all over our garden.
We determined that they required training. Some discipline would not go amiss.
In South Africa there are apparently two kinds of dog schools. The one for pets and the other for weapons training. The first school we went to mistakenly was of the latter kind and was uniformly attended by people in brown shirts with guns tucked neatly into their belts and who all seemed to be slavering at the mouth for a touch of blood sport.
And it may well be that our single attendance at this school scarred our puppies forever or perhaps it simply set in motion the recalcitrant gene they had inherited from the hyena pack from whence they had emerged.
But we pressed on with their training. Within 9 months two things had occurred. The dogs had grown vertically and Rhona horizontally (she was heavily pregnant). But not one to walk away from a challenge she would come to every lesson to be whisked about at the end of a leash with no control whatsoever about where this might lead.
With our baby Kyle?s birth, it became immediately apparent that they were now ?my dogs? or ?your bladdy dogs? as Rhona would discretely put it. I invested mistakenly in a chain on which I could walk both at the same time. By this stage it was the equivalent of trying to manage a pair of rampant buffalo.
I would go for morning walks on the local golf course. 5 o?clock in the morning walks lest I might bump into some innocent being along the way who was just out to enjoy rather than being eaten by nature.
Lest you might think I exaggerate there were certain things that would precipitate moments of sheer insanity in these two. Border Collies for some reason set them off to the extent that if they happened to be chained together at the time they would attempt to kill each other if it was not possible to get at the collie. Attempting to separate them in these moments given that they were chained together was nigh impossible.
One extremely early morning on the golf course I had made the fateful error of allowing them a moment of freedom when far away on the horizon appeared to chaps carrying a yapping bundle, which transpired to be a Chihuahua. In my desperation to stop what would now obviously unfold I was slammed into a 5-foot deep gully arse over tit in the process breaking a couple of ribs.
I can only feel great remorse now as I recall with horror how the rampant Bilbo and Baggins raced off like apparitions out of Mordor towards this happy little threesome.
And they made the worst decision imaginable. They decided to hold their Chihuahua high in the air above their heads in a game of see how high you can jump.
It took moments. By the time I reached them, breathless and in pain they were leaping around like banshees as these two camp chaps screamed lustily. What was infinitely worse was that they has managed somehow in one of their agile leaps to lower the trousers of one of the chaps so that his extremely pale and pimply bum was now on view for all to see. Yet still he valiantly held the bundle of hairless dog high in the air above him.
After Rhona had applied the necessary medications for lockjaw, rabies and mad dog disease and I had paid compensation for insult and injury I determined that Bilbo and Baggins needed a better home. Preferably somewhere in another world.
I had this terrible fear that I would return home one day from work to find them happily wagging their tails on our garden having eaten the baby ? ?Look what we?ve done? they would wag. ?Aren?t we something??
So I proceeded to write, what has been perhaps one of the most successful pieces of advertising in my career. I did not realize that one does not need to run a classified campaign. That a single insertion might work sufficiently. But as if to emphasise my determination I placed ads in Newspapers, the Landbou Weekblad and Farmers Weekly.
The headline of the ad read ? Loyal in the extreme, but the nightmare of burglars?.
And the phone rang off the hook. People with a stamp sized property in Soweto called. We had calls from Namibia, Botswana. We were forced into a short-term immersion programme to learn to speak Afrikaans once more.
I finally determined without any particular reason that a Meneer Nel of Vereeeniging would be the happy recipient.
But within a very short time we were beginning to doubt the wisdom of our decision. After all, despite their significant aberrations, argued Rhona, they were family.
Happily the dogs themselves decided it was time to go and they let us know one day leaving no doubt whatever about their intentions.
We had spent months on a garden next to a pool in our backyard. Rhona is very picky when it comes to trees and finally, after visiting every nursery in Christendom it seemed she chose 4 healthy specimens to be planted in large planter boxes around the pool.
The dogs in their wisdom had decided that somehow these trees were an infringement on their rights. So they removed them from the planter boxes, broke them up into well ordered piles of matchsticks and then, in case we were quite clear they emptied all of the sand in the planters directly into the pool.
Meneer Nel arrived on Saturday. He wore no shoes but he did come, as farmers often do in a very large and very new Mercedes Benz. I had the dogs demonstrate to him their remarkable disciplines of sitting and staying.
I walked them to the door of his car, ordered them to jump in a sit with they obediently did. And then Meneer Nel enquired of me in that obsequiously polite way that such people often have what the dogs were named.
I replied Bilbo and Baggins. A cloud went over Meneer Nel?s faces. I had witnessed a cloud of this nature once before when Rhona and I had crossed the border into the Transkei and we were warned by a big burly policeman to ?Beware of stray enemas?. We were non-plussed as to what such a beast might be. That is until we hit a goat on a rutted road and realized what he may have been alluding to.
Meneer Nel removed a pocket book from his short pants and proceed to write diligently if indeterminately into this book their names.
Months later I had a call from the aforesaid Meneer Nel of Vereeniging. He had called politely to report on the progress of the ?Hunds?. Bilbo he said was indeed a very loyal dog who spent all day moping around his wife. ?Maar die Bagggini? he said pronouncing it as if it were some sort of Italian meatloaf. ?Baggini doesn?t listen to a word I say.?
I did not have the heart to tell him that this may not be a function of his mispronunciation.